Once an almost impossible feat, studying overseas while studying engineering is making its way into the mainstream.

As a civil engineering student
who grew up in Manchester, N.H.,
all Caitlin Malley knew about Denmark
was that it was a small country
in Europe. As for the concept of
car-sharing? She’d never heard
of it. But the Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI) senior got a crash
course in both during her junior
year as a technology consultant
at a Copenhagen nonprofit that offers
its members a time-share in cars
instead of condos. Malley’s
eight-week Danish gig was part of
a WPI program designed to expose
students to problem-solving outside
their majors and, often, outside
of the United States. While she
admired the Danes’ balance
of work and family and she became
a veritable expert on the automation
of billing and booking in car-sharing
nonprofits, the real boon was a
new global sensibility. “It’s
the most important thing I’ve
done in college,” she says.
“It made me grow as a student
and a professional.”

Time was, study abroad was what
humanities majors did. Engineering
students, on the other hand, pretty
much stayed put, lest their sequential
coursework be disrupted. A rigid
schedule and precious few electives
didn’t allow for a semester
spent lollygagging in Europe, much
less a full year—or so many
believed. But in the last decade,
the number of engineering students
studying abroad has tripled as more
U.S. engineering schools introduce
ways—like short-term projects
such as Malley’s and Georgia
Tech’s immersive International
Plan—to incorporate the experience
into the curriculum. The trend,
say educators, is critical to the
future of American engineering in
an increasing global economy. “We’re
at an incredible disadvantage as
a nation if our engineers are not
trained to work with people across
cultures and languages,” warns
John Grandin, director of the University
of Rhode Island’s (URI) International
Engineering Program.

Indeed, an engineer is far more
likely to work for a multinational
corporation than is, say, a doctor
or a lawyer. “Engineering
is a profoundly international field
now,” says Michael Vande Berg,
the vice president of academic and
external affairs at the Council
on International Education Exchange
(CIEE) based in Portland, Maine.
“Increasingly, what engineers
are faced with is that they have
the technical ability to achieve
major solutions, but they can’t
come in with a one-size-fits-all
solution without working closely
with people on the ground.”
And these days, many of those people
are likely to live beyond U.S. borders.
Having lived and learned outside
the country helps to foster an understanding
of the context of any project, be
it building a water treatment plant
in Central America or designing
the next MP3 player for the Asian
market. “Anyone who has lived
abroad is more sensitive to other
ways people view things that may
not exactly be how you grew up,”
explains John LaGraff, director
of Syracuse University’s Engineering
Year Abroad Program.

Meanwhile, experience abroad can
mean the world to potential employers.
Natalie Mello, WPI’s director
of global operations, has found
that engineering students who have
studied abroad are much more desirable
to recruiters. In fact, says Georgia
Institute of Technology Vice Provost
for Institutional Development Jack
Lohmann, kids who don’t go
abroad may ultimately be at a disadvantage.

But while the number of engineering
students who go abroad is at an
all-time high, the percentage is
still minuscule compared with other
disciplines. According to the latest
data from the Institute of International
Education, engineering students
made up 2.9 percent of the 191,321
American students who studied abroad
in the 2003-04 school year, compared
with social science majors at 22.6
percent and business students, who
comprised 17.5 percent.

“The trend is in the right
direction, but we aren’t anywhere
near the proportion of engineering
students [in the country],”
says Carl Herrin of NAFSA: Association
of International Educators.

What’s keeping so many engineering
students at home? “There’s
been a certain level of American
arrogance that we are the best,”
claims Herrin. In fact, it wasn’t
that long ago that the United States
was in the driving seat, Rhode Island’s
Grandin explains. “If people
wanted products, they always looked
toward us.” But while the
realities of the marketplace have
shifted seemingly overnight, attitudes
in engineering schools are still
catching up. “The message
tacitly is that study abroad is
not important,” Lohmann says.
At the same time, the last thing
engineering students want is a wrench
in their coursework. “We are
talking about students who tend
to be risk-averse,” Mello
argues. “They are not prone
to taking a lot of chances.”

Both
Near and Far

Nevertheless, some colleges have
had great success in creating and
promoting programs for their engineering
students to study and intern in
other countries. In 1974, WPI overhauled
its entire curriculum to one that
is project-based, which means that
every student is required to complete
three semester-long projects. While
many students opt for domestic assignments—sponsors
have included Goddard Flight Center
in Maryland and Gallo Wineries in
California—fully half go farther
out still, from designing energy-efficient
housing in Namibia to collecting
data from Thailand’s hill
tribes. Language proficiency isn’t
required, but students are prepped
in survival skills, like how to
order in a restaurant and how not
to offend their hosts. Going abroad
does require planning up to a year
in advance, but the results are
well worth it, WPI’s Mello
says. “The cool thing is that
you send a student out into the
world once and they want to go again.”

Other schools take a more traditional
approach. The Engineering Year Abroad
Program at Syracuse, for example,
was started in 1980 by LaGraff,
a mechanical and aerospace engineering
professor who had completed his
graduate work in London. He tapped
his British contacts to help him
iron out conflicting school schedules
so that Syracuse students (the program
is now open to non-Syracuse engineering
students also) could study at The
City University of London for the
appropriate Syracuse credits. “We’ve
always insisted it be a year because
we want them to have an authentic
experience and do the exams with
the British students at the end
of the year,” LaGraff says.
The program steadily attracts some
20 students a year and is now offering
a semester in Madrid.

Coordinating sequential courses
has always been a challenge in sending
engineering students overseas, which
is why URI’s International
Engineering Program incorporates
a fifth year of study and a B.A.
in a language. German professor
Grandin came up with the idea in
1987 with then-engineering Dean
Hermann Viets (now at Milwaukee
School of Engineering). “We
had a meeting of the minds and decided
that we were doing very little to
prepare engineers for the global
economy,” Grandin recalls.
The program started by sending fourth-year
students to the Technical University
of Braunschweig in Germany for a
semester and then on to a six-month
internship somewhere in Germany.
Today, the program has expanded
to include French and Spanish options
with a Chinese program in the works.
And last fall, URI introduced an
international Ph.D. program with
the Technical University of Braunschweig.

Perhaps most comprehensive of all
international engineering programs
is Georgia Tech’s new International
Plan. While the school has had a
long history of sending engineering
students abroad—roughly one-third
of graduates have some experience
outside the United States—the
degree-long program introduced last
fall integrates international studies
into a major. In what school administrators
hope will become their signature
program, the plan requires coursework
in global economics, international
relations, regional interests and
a capstone course. Students must
gain a proficiency in a language
and spend at least two terms abroad.
The program is designed so students
will graduate in four years with
an International Plan designation
on their diploma. Vice Provost Lohmann
says the plan will immerse students
in another culture, rather than
just expose them to it. “It’s
not an add-on, it’s integrated
into the context of your major,”
he says. Because of the language
requirement, most participants will
have to join the program during
their freshman year. Georgia Tech
hopes to enroll 50 percent of its
students in the International Plan
by the year 2010. Lohmann acknowledges
the goal is ambitious but says that
instilling “global competence”
is critical to the education of
engineers today. “Students
need to graduate with an understanding
of how their profession is practiced
on a global scale.”

While most students who go abroad
still head to the capitals of Europe—some
60 percent—the number of those
who go to Latin America, Asia and
Africa are slowly inching up. Georgia
Tech, for instance, has programs
in China and is expanding into Singapore.
And Purdue University’s Global
Engineering Alliance for Research
and Education program sends students
to Mumbai (Bombay). “Many
of these countries we perhaps have
the least understanding of, so it’s
important to have an opportunity
to experience and study in places
like China, India, Japan and the
Middle East,” says William
DeLauder, executive director of
the Lincoln Commission, a bipartisan
group of policymakers who are working
to increase and diversify study-abroad
opportunities, especially with underrepresented
groups. In its report to Congress,
the commission recommended the launch
of a Lincoln Fellowship Program
it hopes will increase the numbers
of students who study abroad by
10 percent a year, reaching 1 million
by 2017.

Some say that’s a tall order,
but CIEE’s Vande Berg is optimistic.
He says the 2000 ABET criteria have
given engineering schools the flexibility
to carve out more opportunities
abroad for students. “We’re
very confident that we are going
to be sending an increasing number
of engineering students abroad in
coming years,” Vande Berg
predicts. “We are on the verge
of a truly revolutionary turnabout.”